Just yesterday I became aware that people drink (or inhale the vapor of) a infusion made of VHS videotapes to get high. It's been a long time since I laughed so much... with ideas like that we can confirm that there are no bounds on human stupidity.

[Warning: VHS tea may cause cancer or metal poisoning, take it only if you are completely retarded and want to kill that lonely neuron of yours.]

Hey, MI-6 recently released the fact that semen was used as a secret invisible ink. I just wanna see the CIA show them up. How about breast milk booby trap bombs? Cause I know "booby trap" is somehow related. The truth is out there!

"In June 1915, Walter Kirke, deputy head of military intelligence at GHQ France, wrote in his diary that Mansfield Cumming, the first chief (or C) of the SIS was making enquiries for invisible inks at the London University"
And he had a rather appropriate name too!

But they were classified and kept by the CIA. The documents themselves (1 [cia.gov] 2 [cia.gov] 3 [cia.gov] 4 [cia.gov] 5 [cia.gov] 6 [cia.gov]) carry stamps keeping them exempt from declassification for dates as late at 1978 and 1989.

This is sounding like the "anarchist cookbook" which had made up recipes intended to blow up potential bombers rather than cooking up the real thing.Right up there with "get high from banana peels"

You want a solvent for mucilage, try ethanol fumes. I have no idea how to test it because envelope manufacturers have not used biological mucilage for longer than I've been alive... Maybe a museum or an old relative has an envelope they'd let you mess with?

I dunno, I think you give the guy who put the cookbook together a bit too much credit. If anything it was a collection that was put together from book learning and inexperience. Sure, anybody can look up the reaction and figure out how to make nitroglycerin. Doing it safely on the other hand isn't something that a lot of people (even some who did it) can speak to.

Getting high from banana peels is a perfect example. It wasn't new in the cookbook. It was a hoax printed in a Princeton newspaper. The author of

Actually I have only read some of the online versions, and some bits of the US Army Improvised Munitions Manual (1969) which probably provided a fair amount of source material.

I wish I had read the real book, always meant to check it out. Maybe that wasn't a good example but, I have heard many times this theory that it was intended to kill the people who tried it, and I just never bought it. It always seemed plausible enough that errors or bad procedures were more the result of lack of QA than actual malici

Ive made nitroglycerine and its not that dangerous until you get to the unstable levels of concentration.

Low grade nitro that can take out a house by putting it in a nice sealed pressure cooker left on a fire in the basement? Easy as hell to do. I was 13 when I mixed my first batch of it. I made a small mason jar full of low grade stuff. a campfire in the wood to detonate it, 1 hour later it left a nice 6 foot crater where the campfire used to be. we spent the next 6 hours putting out small fires in

This was discussed here on Slashdot and if you read the packet of declassified docs relating to it, it was pretty well stated that sure, these are actual things you can do, but they might not quite work out as you plan.

"they" - meaning law enforcement, preferred you blow yourself up and draw attention to yourself instead of having to hunt down every PFY that downloaded the book off the local BBS at 1200 (or 300!

"they" - meaning law enforcement, preferred you blow yourself up and draw attention to yourself instead of having to hunt down every PFY that downloaded the book off the local BBS at 1200 (or 300!) bps.

Many of the books called by the name "Anarchist's Cookbook" on old BBSs weren't the same as the print edition. Actually in the early-mid 90's I don't think I ever actually found a text version of the print edition on any local BBS (or Fido, or, later, telnet BBSs). If anything, most of the BBS versions were more dubious than the original. I remember reading how to make a "contact explosive" from iodine and ammonia, and pondering how the hell someone would do that without blowing themselves up or inhaling particularly nasty fumes. Some of them devoted tens of pages on stuffing match heads into tennis balls and calling it a "grenade"...

The 90's were a much simpler time. I supported myself through high school by selling print, and disk, copies of the BBS versions of the Anarchist Cookbook, and other "counterculture" literature to my fellow students. I think I charged like $10 for a print copy, and $5 for a floppy. These days I would have been expelled, arrested, and probably permanently black marked from ever having a successful life.

I also sold compilations of ways to extract drugs from ethnographic plants for awhile (most of which were probably completely innacurate and potentially harmful, in retrospect)...

I feel sorry for kids there days... Half the stuff I did in my youth would get someone into very deep water now.

I actually made some nitrogen tri-iodide at around age 15. I had gone to a summer camp for "gifted" students at a local college, and we had pretty free access to the chem lab. So, I and a buddy were able to get pure iodine crystals and concentrated ammonium hydroxide, which made it easy. You just dissolve the iodine in the NH4OH, filter the residue, and do whatever you want with it while it's wet. Once it dries, it's a very effective contact explosive. Great for painting on stair treads and doorknobs, or st

Go back a bit more and my uncle was making touch powder (picric acid version I think) and simple gunpowder and when that was not enough for his little cannon he ducked under the fence to the army dump and came back with cordite. It turns out there was also mustard gas there but it wasn't found until decades later.He was the smart one. Another younger relative blew off four fingers playing with less powerful home made explosives some time in the 1960s. Some of the old chemistry textbooks were a lot more i

I remember being very happy to be out of high school when Columbine happened. I was also very happy that our school had a very high nerd ratio, so we were never really bullied much or ostracized to the point where the less balanced of us were tempted to act out. Hell, in a certain sense we were even respected... which is very odd from all I've heard from other peoples experience of high school

Most of our tastes were pretty benign, we were more likely messing with computers than messing with potential expl

A general rule of spooks . . . we'll tell you how we spied 100 years ago . . . but not how we do it today . ..

Except the principles of modern espionage go back hundreds if not thousands of years. Do you think brush-passes or dead drops were modern inventions? How about encryption and codes? While today's technology includes stuff spies could have only dreamed of 100 years ago, the fundamentals and basics are exactly the same.

No, the real joke is on you. Why? Because the CIA and all other government and private (RIAA) acronyms can do today in plain sight and most importantly, legally what they had to do behind your back 50 years ago.

All of them are re: the recipe for the GERMANSâ(TM) invisible ink in WWI (samples, methods for detecting, etc.). What ârecent advancement in techâ(TM) suddenly made this no longer secret?

Notice that theyâ(TM)re stamped âoeExempt from automatic declassificationâ in 1978. In 1999, the agency rejected a Freedom of Information Act request to release the six documents, asserting that doing so âoecould be expected to damage the national security.â Really?

And of course, I have to add enough text here to avoid the lameness filter, which said "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. " So if I were to write a few lines about the wonders of how Slashdot does not yet support UTF-8 (still), except on